Knowledge communities commonly use the Motivation, Opportunity, Ability (MOA) model for their community efforts.

If you have a community that isn't sharing the quantity and quality of knowledge you need, it's a problem with one or more of these three elements. Each can be dissected.

Motivation

The most common problem is motivation. Members simply don't feel like sharing information. Motivations are intrinsic (people doing it because they enjoy the process of sharing knowledge) or extrinsic (people doing it for an external reward; praise, recognition, money etc...)

It's easier to use prizes/gamification, but this does more harm in the long run. Members tire of rewards and participation plummets.

Members are more likely to share knowledge if:

a) the community is active, no-one wants to waste their time on an inactive community.

b) their contribution will have a significant impact. Self-efficacy is a powerful motivator. People will share knowledge if it will positively impact many people.

c) it helps integrate them into a group. If sharing a lot of knowledge is seen as a standard way to feel part of a group, more members are likely to do it.

To increase the motivations of someone to share knowledge in a community, you can tweak these. First, remove any dead/quiet areas of the community. This makes the community feel more active (see social density). If you have no discussions, initiate a few and then directly solicit people to participate in those discussions to get things started.

Second, highlight the impact which contributions have made. Have a place that shares details of the best advice shared, how it helped people in the community. Keep a rundown of the best advice of the week. Create a wiki/eBook of the best advice shared in the community and it's impact.

Third, encourage a sense of community. A key part of this is off-topic discussions. Members are far more likely to share knowledge with people that they like. However, if they can only talk about knowledge sharing issues, they will never get to know people. They might only visit the community when they need information. You need to allow and encourage other discussions/activities that help facilitate these group bonds.

You don't have to go wildly off-topic here, but you do need to encourage members to get to know each other personally. At least, have discussions that let members blow off steam about the biggest challenges/frustrations they have.

Opportunity (trigger)

Members need the opportunity to participate. Of course, for online communities members always have the opportunity to participate. We need more than that. BJFogg would call these triggers (make sure you watch the video on his site).

How would a member know when to participate? What triggers this behavour?

If visiting the community isn't a habit, the answer will be never.

For professional communities, most people visit during work hours. Pick a time, perhaps during lunch or towards the end of the day, and aim to trigger a visit then. This can be via a daily outreach e-mail. That e-mail could included unanswered questions, latest success stories, or tips you feel all members should know.

Alternatively, you can have a lunchtime quicktips feature. A twitter-length tip based upon what members are working on during that particular day. Now members know that after they have lunch they browse the community.

Having a list of unsolvable questions that is updated during a lunch hour can be effective too. You need to trigger the behaviour. You might also let members contact specific individuals for advice - if they are particular fans of that person. Tagging members they want to reply in posts can provide simple, direct, triggers.

Ability

Ability here comprises of two elements.

The first is the literal ability to contribute. Do members have the time, money, and resources (computer with internet) to participate? You need to have a simple homepage in your community that reveals all the relevant questions and new knowledge in a single location. Your members need to be able to scan this in a matter of seconds.

The second is the ability to contribute good knowledge. Health communities would be terrible if the advice didn't come from doctors. If you the majority of your members are new to the topic, it will be difficult to share high quality information. The problem for many communities is to attract, keep, and motivate the experts to participate.

A big ask is asking members to do something that takes considerable time, resources, or physical/mental effort to do. Considerable, here, is in comparison with responding to a discussion.

Asking members to record a video of themselves and post it online, is a big ask. Asking members to write an essay (or even a blog post) is a big ask. Asking members to do anything that is difficult tends to slightly reduce the level of activity in the community.

Members that can't be bothered to undertake the ask tell themselves they don't care about the community that much. It changes their relationship with the community*.

It's better to ask members to do small, simple, specific, things. Ask members to respond to a discussion, vote in a poll, share their best tip about x. These investments build up. Members keep telling themselves that they increasingly like the community, that's why they spend so much time here.

Ten tiny contributions to a community is better than a single, big, contribution. It's the tiny contributions over extended periods of time that build habits and an understanding of the person. Stop asking members to do things that are difficult, look for tiny contributions they can make instead.

* The exception here is to take a pledge to do something big in the future and then hold members accountable to it. These seem to work well.

Few communities collapse over a single incident. It's unlikely a majority of your members will quit in disgust over one issue. Instead, they will gradually drift away.

Members won't leave if you make a single bad decision. They won't leave if there is a fight. They will tolerate a lot (but will complain about it). Anger isn't the emotion you need to worry about, it's boredom.

Members leave communities when they no longer find it interesting.

If the community no longer provokes an emotional reaction, has fresh/interesting discussions, provides useful information, or doesn't help someone satisfy their ego needs, they will leave.

Members don't quit communities, they just visit less frequency. Eventually, they don't visit at all.

This means you have many opportunities to reverse this trend. You can monitor the number of visits per member, the average time spent on the site per visit, and the number of active members in the community.

If the community begins to fade, you need a new programme of activities. You need to try new themes/topics for the community. You need to set new goals/targets for the community and interactive heavily with the regular members of the community.

For mature communities, it might be regular members. Without them, activity would fizzle out quickly. If they visit the community and see too many 'newbie' threads, or repeatedly asked questions, they might begin to visit less frequently. That soon becomes a problem.

To cater to regulars, you might make regular references to key members, previous events/activities, and ensure the balance of discussions are about things that go beyond the basics.

In this situation, you assume that most members know what came before.

However, if the community has a growth problem, you might focus upon newcomers. Not just people new to the community, but new to the topic.

Imagine you've just begun fishing. You need some equipment advice. You find a and join a fishing community. When you join do you want to see discussions about obscure/new fishing techniques, or do you want to get the basic equipment information. Yet, after a few years in that community, you probably don't want to see the same entry level equipment discussions anymore.

These are two ends of a wide continuum. You need to shift the balance to suit your community. It might be 70/30 split towards regulars, or 30/70 to newcomers. It's your choice.

It helps to have a good design, groups, and ensure everyone can find what they need. However, being easy to find isn't the same as influencing what people see when they first visit, what appears in the communications, and how you spend more of your time.

Sayid asks how to get people to join his struggling community for people that like beach holidays.

That's a tough sell.

First, it's a struggling community. Who wants to join a struggling community?

Second, 'people that like beach holidays' is a weak concept. This includes 70% of the planet. Mass inclusion isn't good for communities.

Third, the level of interest is low. 'like' isn't the same as passion. We might spend a week planning a beach holiday and then take 2 weeks enjoying the holiday. How does the community survive for the rest of the year?

But this overlooks the biggest problem with this question.

By the time you've launched a community, you should already know who, specifically, you're going to target, what you're going to tell them, and built relationships up with the first members of the community.

In a previous community, we noticed that people liked to post what equipment they used on their profile page. They also compared different types of equipment. We incorporated this into a specific profile question and created a category solely for equipment comparisons.

Likewise, members liked to subtly boast about which events they had attended, so we made this a profile feature too. Members could choose to list all the events they had attended.

In one community, members always debated who was the best in their field. This also became a profile question and an ongoing poll.

In another community, members spent a lot of time talking about upcoming events. We created a place in the community for this.

If you know what sort of information members seek for and the format they like it, you can create areas in the community solely for this. If members frequently ask questions related to a specific issue and like simple tips, you can create a place in the community for this.

If you know how members like to create their identities, you can help them do this. If members like to refer to the famous people in their field they've met, or post photos of themselves with famous people, you can create areas where they can do this. If members like to display their collections/equipment in photos, you can create a specific place for this (and let other members vote on it).

If you know what members do in the community, you can incorporate this in to what you do. If members like to debate politics, you can create a place just for this.

This doesn't mean you've done something wrong, it's more simply the natural human response to change. You're fighting against system-justification theory. Members will typically defend the status quo (when if they don't particularly like it).

The danger here is you make a big change in the community, receive a brutal negative feedback, and decide to change back. This prevents you from guiding the community to where it needs to go.

There are steps you can take. You can let members know about the change in advance, involve members in the change, and frequently seek their opinions. However, you're still likely to face a negative impact.

This means you need to appreciate that you will face a negative feedback in advance. You need to ride out this storm. After the first month, see what your data tells you. Over time, the new changes will become the status quo.

If people are participating in a community for extrinsic reasons, they're likely to participate more frequently.

If you run competitions, offer prizes, add gamification systems, people might participate more frequently (gamification studies typically show a small impact in larger, established, communities). However, the quality of contributions is low.

Worse still, you need to continually increase the rewards to maintain the level of contributions. Once the rewards are removed or become stale, the level of participation plummets.

When you begin offering rewards, you change the participant's motivational state. A member that might respond to questions because she likes to help people and believes in the community, now participates to get prizes.

You can do serious long-term harm by offering extrinsic rewards.

Studies show that extrinsically motivated people participate more (until the rewards become stale), but intrinsically motivated members create the best quality responses (and stay for longer).

It's the quality responses that attracts more people. It's the quality responses that increases all member's pride in the community. It's the quality responses that spur other members to share their own thoughts/learning.

Two action points here. First, resist the urge to add gamification systems. Second, it's your absolute duty to shine the spotlight on the quality contributions and mention their impact to the author. This self-efficacy, the impact that a member's great post has had on other members, is what will spur on more quality contributions.

Too often, we think of good conversations as the ones that convey practical information and bad conversations as the ones that don't.

This is a mistake.

When you spend time with your friend, do you spend your time conveying useful, practical, information to each other? I doubt it. You might talk about films, politics, music, your lives, challenges you face, and all manner of trivial issues.

Does that make these conversations any less meaningful? No. They're all bonding discussions. They bring your group closer together. That's meaningful. It would be bizarre to restrict your community solely to conveying useful information. These are all good discussions.

We might, however, want to restrict the meaningless conversations. You might want to close/stop the discussions that don't increase self-disclosure nor reveal useful information. You get to the the arbiter of what's meaningful/meaningless. I suspect at the moment we're too timid about that role. It's a tough one, but one that needs to be performed.

We need to change good and bad discussions to meaningful and meaningless.